On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 05:27:37PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: : <quote who="Christopher Vance"> : : > People who don't like the GPV can look for stuff with a BSD license. : : ^ And perhaps do themselves a favour by not : implying mistruths about other Free Software. : It's bad marketing, bad politics, and not : remotely productive for anyone participating : in Free Software work, regardless of their : preference of license. Infighting - especially : when it disregards the truth - doesn't raise : anyone's boats.
I didn't rant, okay? One letter was intended to express an opinion, not start an argument. As a user of several BSDs at home and (looks like it's going to be) several Linuxes at work, I get a little fed up with people who think the GPL (see how I spelled it this time) is the only way to Open Source heaven, and that one of the ~53 (exact number unknown to me, but > 3) distros of Linux is the only really free OS. I sometimes get upset at people who rave that stuff licenced one way is no good, merely because of the license, and has to be reimplemented with a different licence. This does happen in both directions, you know. License bigotry, all over, wastes a lot of effort which could be put into making fewer of pieces of better software, rather than more pieces of mediochre stuff, all of which are missing the bits that are hard to get right, just because they're still reinventing the horse. And what's worse, they're doing it incompatibly. Personally, I think the free-beer stuff I get tends to be better engineered than some of the competing free-speech stuff. (And I'm sure there are exceptions, okay?) When there's no choice at home, I'll take whichever I can get, even if I have to run it under Linux emulation. And when there's no choice at work, you sometimes just have to do it all over again from scratch... -- Christopher Vance -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
